Last Wednesday, as Russian missiles pummeled Kyiv, the Ukrainian military’s satellite communications were suddenly cut off. Ukrainian officials say the call to cut access to Starshield, Elon Musk’s military-grade Starlink product, came from the White House (allegations the US has denied). Almost simultaneously, across the Atlantic, US President Donald Trump revived his threats of Canadian annexation at a midterms rally in Arizona.
Calling Ukraine’s experience parallel to Canada’s would be disingenuous; our military does not rely on Starshield, and we are not currently at war. Our country and military do, however, rely heavily on US technology—an issue BetaKit has written about extensively. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has spent much of the past year pledging to change that. Carney has also promised to “diversify away from” Starlink, and has awarded a military contract to Telesat for secure Arctic satellite communications. The Department of National Defence is reportedly bringing together a suite of Canadian AI tech to build a “MAIple stack” for use in defence.
Despite a recognized need for change, the transition has been slow and uneven. Reporting from The Maple found that the DND has paid nearly $68 million to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and their Canadian subsidiaries so far this year. Meanwhile, the European Parliament has switched its default search engine from Google to Qwant, the Netherlands built a domestic code repository to replace GitHub, and France is already three years into its plan to transition its public service toward Linux.
That retreat from US tech hegemony is evidence of growing global concern over where the US state ends, and its corporate giants begin. Starshield’s rug pull in Ukraine should be a blinking red light on the dangers of dependency back home.
Jesse Cole,
Prairies Reporter
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Jodi Kovitz, Managing Director of Business at Tangerine Bank, explains how Tangerine Business is evolving its model to better support solo founders, side-hustlers, and small business owners, given these recent trends.
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Join BetaKit and Float on Friday, October 23rd at 11:00 AM ET for tactical advice and practical strategies on managing volatile AI costs and foreign currency fees.
We’ll cover:
- Why AI spend behaves differently from standard software budget lines
- Key findings and insights from Float’s AI Spending Snapshot
- Managing foreign exchange fees on USD-billed invoices
- Practical frameworks to track ROI and assign clear spend ownership
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Data point
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The refresh
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BetaKit Podcast · Oct. 12
“I think that we will look back on prediction markets the same way we look back on altcoins and … NFTs.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Koho CEO Daniel Eberhard discussed becoming Canada’s newest unicorn, (potentially) becoming Canada’s newest bank, the possibilities of launching a telecom, and why Koho won’t touch prediction markets. Watch and listen now ›
Contributors: Alex Riehl (Ottawa staff writer), Douglas Soltys (editor in chief), Jesse Cole (Prairies reporter), Sarah Rieger (managing editor), Trevor Nichols (web editor).
Feature image courtesy SpaceX via Unsplash.